She earned two master's degrees, one in chemical engineering in 1990 from Wageningen University under the supervision of Yehudi K. Levine and Tjeerd Schaafsma, and another in experimental physics in 1990 from Utrecht University under the supervision of Daan Frenkel.
[1] After postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford with Paul Madden and Jean-Pierre Hansen, at the Shell Research and Technology Centre Amsterdam, and at Bristol University with Michael P. Allen and Robert Evans, she joined the Utrecht faculty in 1999.
[2] In spring 2020 Marjolein Dijkstra received an ERC Advanced Grant research funding for her project Rational Design of Soft Hierarchical Materials with Responsive Functionalities: Machine learning Soft Matter to create Soft Machines.. [3] Dijkstra won the Minerva Prize of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in 2000.
This prize is given every two years for outstanding research by a female physicist; Dijkstra won it for her work with René van Roij and Robert Evans on "Phase diagram of highly asymmetric binary hard-sphere mixtures".
[4] Dijkstra was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.